Today, business process management plays an important role in a competitive business arena. Typically, a business process is an aggregate of business activities that evolves through various stages or instances. Most business applications are executed without the use of an explicit workflow or process engine. These business processes, the so called built-in processes, may not require any explicit process definition for execution. The process logic is reflected in the implemented business logic. In other words, for built-in processes, the process visibility on process instance level is not given today.
In general, gaining end-to-end business process visibility at real time in today's distributed, interconnected business applications is difficult. As a result, it is hard to get a picture of what is happening, or not happening, in the run-time environment. Currently, a report can be generated using databases and other associated modules after the business process is completed. However, the report cannot be generated synchronously when the business process is running or at run-time. Therefore, a real time visibility of the status of the business processes instances is desirable since real time monitoring is a prerequisite for continued business process improvement or to act as soon as an issue becomes visible at the horizon.